Re: Draft Policy for Self-Archiving University Research Output

From: N.V. Joshi <nvjoshi_at_ces.iisc.ernet.in>
Date: Fri, 26 Dec 2003 16:48:43 +0000

Hello

Something about possible duplication of information was bothering me for
some time, and the word 'otherwise' (underlined below) prompted this mail
and the two questions.

> UNIFIED OPEN-ACCESS PROVISION STRATEGY:
> (OAJ) Researchers publish their research in an
> open-access journal if a suitable one exists [5%], *otherwise*
> (OAA) they publish it in a suitable toll-access
> journal [95%] and also self-archive it in their own research
> institution's open-access research archive.

(1) Are there any guidelines about self-archiving (adding to the
Institutional E-print server) articles which have been published in 'gold'
journals?

The disadvantages due to duplication are probably self-evident. However,
not all 'gold' journals provide good search facilities. Secondly, it may
not be easy (at least for some of the gold journals) for them to make
their holdings easily accesible for the search engines of other archives.

I personally feel that the advantages would easily outweigh the
disadvantages, but would be grateful for critical advise on this matter.

Fortunately, an excellent E-print archive facilty has been set up
at our institute (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India) by
Dr. Rajashekar. Unfortunately (and perhaps expectedly) the response
from the reseachers has been lukewarm at best. The Institute publishes
more than a thousand papers in peer reviewed journals every year, and
a sizable fraction is in the 'gold' journals.

A simple 'go ahead' from the authors would (I suppose) be adequate for
the Administration to download the articles from the gold journals and
deposit them in the archives (after doing that small but crucial bit of
work for making appropriate entries). But before such an initiative is
launched, I wanted to know if there are any problems that may crop up
later and which I have missed.

(2) How are "toll-free but registration required" journals to be
classified? The DOAJ permits listing such journals, but the issue of
searchability probably becomes more serious for these.

Thank you in anticipation.

N. V. Joshi
Received on Fri Dec 26 2003 - 16:48:43 GMT